Poll: Favorite compression format

[The walrus]

I prefer ZIP. I allways package my programs in ZIP files, whenever I use RAR my inbox is filled with "How do I use RAR files" mails from newbies. Plus, XP has built-in ZIP support.

[red_Marvin]

As the walrus said: XP has built in zip support.

...But I'm on ubuntu that greates something called tar.gz (gzipped tarball?) so...

[Oz]

i use WinRAR, which also supports ZIP, and will uncompress most of the common file formats

RAR 1s t3h 1337357

oz~

[Deleter]

Mine's definitaly rar :-)

me too

[Kevin_theprogrammer]

.tar = tarball
.bz2 = bzip
tar.bz2 = bzipped tarball

Anyways, I prefer to use 7zip for saving my disk space, but I use zip for anything else, since it is sort of a universal format...I don't use Debian Linux that often, so I don't compress using tarballs and bzip2

[DrV]

I've heard from a few different sources that bz2 and rar compression are essentially equivalent. I personally prefer WinRAR's Windows Explorer integration over a command-line tool ilke bzip2 most of the time, but objectively, I like bz2 better for licensing reasons.

I'm not sure where the assertion that RAR is slow comes from - my computer is nowhere near "high end" (Athlon XP 1700+ with 512 MB of RAM) and I find WinRAR to be nearly instantaneous for decompressing anything up to a dozen megabytes or so... I'm happy to wait a few seconds for the considerable bandwidth and storage savings I get from such a format.